licorice. Some of them had ladyfingers for fingers, and they had peppermint eyes and lips like slices of peach. And they loved to kiss.”
“No!” James said. “Kissing is bad.”
“No,” said Jane, very seriously. “Kissing is good. It’s like eating candy, like a treat. The sweet children love to kiss in Paris.” She carried on about fruits and kissing until she saw Auntie coming up the hill with her friends, and she stopped. She picked up her darning and tried to blend into the blanket beneath her, but the children moved in around her. They pleaded for her to tell them her story. Where was her family from? When would they come to retrieve her? Would her mother please bring them candies? Would she teach them how to kiss? James moved her face toward his, and he pushed his thin lips into hers, and then Auntie yanked him away. His own mother dragged him away by his ear. The picnic was over. The servants with whom Jane sat all gathered their families’ food and dishes, and one of the elders helped Jane pack up the Toppans’ lunches as well.
At home, Jane got the paddle. She didn’t cry, and Elizabeth did. She begged her mother to stop, said that Jane was only telling them stories because she asked for them, that it wasn’t her fault, that Jane was just following orders like her mother told her she had to, that Jane hadn’t kissed James, James had kissed her, he had wanted to kiss her, he loved Jane. Jane hadn’t even liked James. Jane wasn’t fast. It was all James. And boys could do what they liked. She only did what he said, the same way that she did what Auntie said. This explanation just made Auntie more mad. The scandal that her own daughter could have asked to hear such vulgarities brought on harsher punishments and shame on James and all the Murphys for socializing with the workers. Finally, Elizabeth fled from the room, and then Auntie stopped. Jane shook as she brought herself upright.
“I will not have your slander under my roof,” Auntie said. “Do you understand? Just because you are a Paddy by blood doesn’t mean you have to act like one.”
“Yes, Auntie,” she said. And then, without looking up, she asked, “Pardon me. I only don’t want to get in trouble. What is a Paddy?”
“A Paddy is what you were born as: lazy, dishonest filth that tells un-Christian lies to anyone who will listen. With a beating and a blessing, we might be able to get rid of those blasphemous qualities.” Jane swallowed and kept her eyes to the ground until Auntie reached down, and with her gnarled hand tilted up Jane’s face, and she said, “You want to go to heaven when you die, don’t you, Jane?”
Jane cleared her throat and said, “Yes, Auntie.”
“Then you can tell no more lies.”
“I weren’t telling lies, mam—”
Jane’s thin eyebrows lifted into her forehead as Auntie leaned down till their faces nearly touched. “You have no sister. You have no family. Your father was a drunken mess, and he abandoned you.”
“He didn’t,” Jane said, her small round jaw set. “He didn’t abandon us. He only couldn’t take care of us anymore and he didn’t want to hurt us. He told my sister and me that before he left us.”
“If I hear one word more about your dishonorable father or insane sister, I’ll take you back to the asylum. Do you want to go back to watery cabbage soup and dry bread?”
Incidents regarding Jane’s family only repeated themselves twice more. Jane learned to draw her mouth tight like a purse string, lest the other children pull out of it for themselves and at her expense. She knew the truth, and Elizabeth and the other children believed her, and that would have to be enough.
Elizabeth attended Jane after each of these beatings. She taught Jane how to pronounce her words so that none of Auntie’s friends would know that she was Irish, taught her about the families in the neighborhood, which ones were friends to Auntie and which ones were not. Elizabeth did everything that she could to undo Auntie’s abuse without contradicting her, but Jane no longer wanted her there, nor thought of her as a friend. Rather, Elizabeth was the woman she became in the stories she told herself about herself. The ones which, now, never left her own mind.
If Jane had been born Elizabeth…she thought about this fatal birth often, particularly during her most strenuous or disgusting chores. How she, Jane, would have used that position, not squander it as Elizabeth had. What she would have seen and experienced. Jane would have gone to Paris. She would have made friends with people unlike anyone she knew now. She would have gotten her education, would have read books, would have written books, would have written scandalous romances. One would have been titled Sweet Blue Eyes after the man who would fall in love with her in Bordeaux. Jane would have had many lovers, not all of them in vineyards, but Sweet Blue Eyes would love only her. He’d write poems to her about the bloom on her cheeks that Auntie said was whorish, and about her hands, which in this fantasy would be smooth with long tender fingers and clean, shiny nails. The poems would be written in French, and Jane would have read them in French. Jane would never sew another stitch. She would dance and sleep till noon and never come back to Lowell. Elizabeth never left Massachusetts. Even Jane’s parents had traveled to America. Elizabeth married the old deacon from down the street, and now she barely saw him. Even Jane’s mother had married her adventurous father…he went insane, but at least he was interesting and interested in improving their station. Elizabeth was thin and lovely, fair and fragile, smart, but not smart enough to scare anyone. Her eyes were vaguely dull, and her hair shone but flatly. She drew no attention, she was unexceptional in almost every way, yet she wore fineries, her hands were soft and smooth, she was not punished for the doings of others, she was allowed attention from good men, she got to play outside, she did not have chores, she could meet the eye of anyone she wanted to see, could talk more plainly than almost anyone, eat at the table, sleep in the cool, in the warmth, wear clothes made for her. Elizabeth had birthdays to celebrate, had friends, and options, and a future.
On Jane’s eighteenth birthday, her indenture ended according to the contract Auntie signed. Jane never realized how foolish she was to expect any celebration other than an afternoon walk as in years before. For eleven years, she had prepared cakes and feasts for Elizabeth’s birthdays. Jane was shocked when, on the first one she celebrated with her, Elizabeth revealed she was turning thirty-two years old. She looked so young, so small, Jane thought. She cried at such small provocation. Every year, Elizabeth returned for her own birthday celebration, and she spent more nights in the Toppan house than she did at her husband’s.
On Elizabeth’s most recent birthday, her forty-fifth, Jane paid particularly close attention, the way a child learns to behave well in advance of asking for favors. She remembered the ache in her arms the morning after she whipped the sponge cake batter into a froth. She remembered collecting eggs for a week from their normal stores, siphoning off the cream from every pail for the filling, scavenging for berries at the beginning of a hot summer, hiding them in the cellar so that no one would find her surprise, soaking them in honey water to mask their bitterness. Jane remembered her frenzied run to the kitchen to pull the pans from the oven in the nick of time. She remembered how late she stayed awake to build the cake with its layers, how carefully she went down the wooden steps with her arms outstretched, a doilied serving tray clutched in her chapped hands. She remembered rising early the following morning to snip the blooms off the wisteria—Elizabeth’s favorite—before the dew set, and setting the prettiest, opened flowers on the top of the cake and at its base. She remembered her pride when Elizabeth grinned at the cake at the end of the feast she had with her friends and how she hugged Jane and thanked her for all her effort. How frail and bony Elizabeth felt against her, even inside of her corset and cage crinoline. Auntie had even smiled at Jane and nodded
